Tiamat Picture

In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is the sea, personified as a goddess, and a monstrous embodiment of primordialchaos. In the Enûma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation, she gives birth to the first generation of gods; she later makes war upon them and is split in two by the storm-god Marduk, who uses her body to form the heavens and the earth. She was known as Thalattē (as variant of thalassa, the Greek word for "sea") in the Hellenistic Babylonian Berossus' first volume of universal history, and some Akkadian copyists of Enûma Elish slipped and substituted the ordinary word for "sea" for Tiamat, so close was the association.